Iran and Israel's Tit-for-Tat May Be Over. The Threat Isn't.

Now that Israel has struck back at Iran, this episode of tit-for-tat missile-messaging just might be over, judging by the “nothing to see here” response from Tehran. If so, and that’s a significant “if,” the critical questions to ask are what has changed and, equally, what hasn’t.

It's going to take a while before we know the full answers to these questions, but I think there are some likely baselines, all of which argue for more rather than less restraint. That’s a big ask from two ideologically driven and domestically unpopular governments, and reason to believe that even if the immediate risk of an escalation to regional war has receded for now, the overall threat hasn’t.

The first big change is that with Iran’s direct attack on Israel last Saturday -- and arguably also the Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus that triggered it — a line has been crossed that can’t be uncrossed. That’s unsettling at its root, because it suggests a new and more dangerous threshold for what’s possible the next time one of these countries feels obliged to use force to send a message. And there will be a next time.

A second change is that Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as well as the US, France and the UK, all participated in shooting down Iran’s missile barrage. That cooperation may be the most important takeaway of the whole exchange for both sides, demonstrating that whatever their views on the Palestinian question and Gaza, the Arab states will engage with Israel against Iran when the stakes become too high. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will have noted this.

Analysts are divided about the military lessons of Iran’s missile attack, and the various armed forces themselves are of course not talking — at least not frankly. To some analysts, this was an abject failure that showed Iran’s weakness given how few reached their targets.

Others have warned that Iran – by giving notice, attacking in smaller waves and using fewer than 200 ballistic and cruise missiles from an arsenal estimated to include at least 3,000 – wasn’t trying to maximize damage, but to make a deterrent point, meaning that next time could be very different. As Michael DiMino, a fellow at the dovish Washington think tank Defense Priorities told me, had the attack been designed to cause real damage it would, at a minimum, have included a barrage from Hezbollah, on Israel’s northern border.

On top of that, the reported $1.3 billion-to-$1.5 billion cost of shooting down 350 drones and missiles not only far outstripped the price Iran had to pay to fire them, but would also be hard to sustain at a time when US interceptors – some of which cost in the low millions of dollars each and can take years rather than weeks to produce – are in high demand. That’s isn’t just to resupply Israel’s defenses but also Ukraine’s and Taiwan’s. In the meantime, we don’t have the data needed to judge: how many interceptors Israel has in its armories, how many the US has left ready to fire in the region, or how many of its most capable missiles Iran has available for use.

All of these unknowns could, behind the scenes, be strengthening deterrence, as each side reassesses its vulnerabilities should the conflict escalate. But I’m pessimistic because of what hasn’t changed: the fundamental relationship between Iran and Israel. If Iran has anything to walk away with from this experience it is the fact that it has demonstrated it isn’t deterred from attacking Israel directly if sufficiently provoked. This is new.

The two countries had been engaged in a shadow war long before these direct strikes, and their deep hostility remains. In this wider conflict, there are no plausible off-ramps in sight, with the progress of Iran’s highly suspect nuclear-fuel enrichment program providing a constant catalyst for potential escalation.

If, as is being reported, Israel’s response consisted of an attack on an airbase outside the city of Isfahan, conducted by small quadra copter drones that were launched from within Iran, that may have been intended to signal Israel’s desire to return the conflict to the shadows. Given the hotheads in the Israeli government, the restraint that showed deserves praise. They didn’t, for example, target Isfahan’s nuclear facilities.

Yet the precedent will remain, and as the eminent scholar of war Lawrence Freedman said in an article this week, the success of such refined messaging via military action has a checkered success rate in history, because the other side so often sees things differently.

Equally unchanged and dangerous is the war in Gaza, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still pledging an assault on Rafah, the town on Gaza’s border with Egypt that’s now home to more than 1 million people, many of them living in tents after fleeing the war in other parts of the strip.